Freedom Watch

The Only Thing It Needs

The Obamacare repeal debate drives home just how much Democrats disdain the very idea of freedom.

Sometimes Democrats say things that, unbeknownst to them, demonstrate the fundamental nature of their tyrannical beliefs far more clearly than they ever could, or would, when asked a direct question about their political philosophy.

We are the United States of America. Not the United States of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton. Putting a person’s name on a move toward freedom, even as imperfect a move as this one may be, is anathema to what those Founders risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to create. It contradicts the very purpose of this nation.

I’m not naïve: There is plenty of political risk in the current process, and undoubtedly, some of the squishier or more vulnerable members of Congress worry about having their names associated with taking away the “free” health care that would inevitably bankrupt states and the federal government.

They worry about being tarred by Nancy “This time I want to read it” Pelosi as “cruel” — another wonderful example of Democrats unwittingly showing just what they are — as if it is kind, as if it provides succor to human dignity, to turn tens of millions of Americans into glorified beggars, living off the earnings of others and to saddle my children with hundreds of billions of dollars of national debt to do it. (One could say the same about roughly 45 million Americans on food stamps. Oh, I’m sorry, we can’t call it that anymore, because it might stigmatize those people eating food that I pay for without getting so much as a “thank you.”)

Nearly a quarter of the 5.5 million citizens of my state of Colorado are on Medicaid. Sadly, among our 50 states, this is not an exceptionally high proportion. Of those 1.35-million people, almost one third were added to the Medicaid rolls since Democrats running our state government decided to expand the program in 2014 by raising the income eligibility threshold.

Now that’s cruel: Cruel to taxpayers, cruel to doctors and nurses who must turn away patients they want to help in order to remain in business, cruel to those made to feel incapable of fending for themselves and disincentivized from doing so — all of this in pursuit of “insurance” that provides no better health outcomes than being uninsured.

To Democrats, not being dependent on others is cruel. To Democrats, not having your neighbors’ wages taken from them is cruel. To Democrats, freedom is slavery.

To Democrats, as our Governor John Hickenlooper is now claiming, it will be Republican moves toward freedom rather than his massive expansion of dependency on the state, which will cost Colorado taxpayers dearly in coming years (a proclamation that assumes, as Democrats always do, that once entitled means always entitled. Sadly, our political history has given them some reason to believe this).

When your thinking is as confused as Pelosi’s or Schumer’s or Hickenlooper’s, when you believe that it is a noble achievement to build a national Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff blush, when you create a mechanism to dominate and stifle one of the largest and most important sectors of the nation’s economy and think that’s a good thing, of course you’re going to give that monstrosity a name.

Just as the monster in Frankenstein has come to be known by its creator’s name (in Mary Shelley’s book, the monster didn’t have a name) so did the mutant creation of Democrats in taking control of the health insurance industry. We call it Obamacare. And, for now, it’s alive.

But once the monster is gone, once peace and calm have returned, whose name do you put on that? Nobody’s, of course.

Because returning us even part way to freedom isn’t about one man. It isn’t about one party. It isn’t about fame and glory and vote-buying, which, after all, is the only reason a politician attaches his name to anything.

Messrs. Ryan and Trump are not eschewing stamping repeal-replace efforts with their names out of a false sense of modesty. Rather, it’s that even Donald Trump, a man not shy about putting his name anywhere he can, knows that there are some things that are the birthright of the American people. Freedom is one of them.